RiseUp: Honoring the Past While Shaping the Future

In 2021, the inaugural Rise Up conference drew over 650 registrants and raised over $25,000 to fund the conference and compensate directly impacted presenters for their time and experiences. The conference featured speakers from throughout the country as well as from around the world! We were honored to hear the stories of system-impacted individuals who have been released and are now working in incredible positions once thought unattainable, such as physicians, lawyers, directors, professors, and more. We hope to expand on this incredible start with our second annual Rise Up conference in September 2022.

Higher education in prison is a field that has experienced a period of rapid expansion over the last twenty years. Although there is a lot of discussion in this field about the importance of including directly impacted people, it is rare to see spaces where those directly impacted people are leading the conversation. Many college-in-prison programs include directly impacted people as tokens on panel discussions, but rarely are they included in leadership positions. The time has come for those with lived experience to set the full agenda for the conversations we believe need to be had. While there is value in working with those who were not incarcerated as collaborators and thought partners, these conversations must be led by those affected by college in prison programs. After all, our expertise and perspectives should be strongly valued in the field, because we lived through it and thrived!

Several partners have come together to work collaboratively and collectively to create this truly innovative conference. Each year we seek formerly incarcerated presenters (who may share the stage with their non-systems impacted allies), to join us in advancing this work. Rise Up is especially interested in innovative yet unrecognized ideas, experiences, and informal experiences that challenge ways of knowing and being.